PNTV: The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen Langer (#202)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. Tv. Today we've got another great book, the Power of Mindful Learning. The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen Langer. This is the third book by Dr. Langer we've featured in the last week and a half or so. We started with counterclockwise, then we did mindfulness. Now we have the Power of Mindful Learning. Applying Mindfulness to Teaching and Learning. Great book. As I mentioned in the other episodes, Dr. Langer is one of the world's leading research scientists. She was the first tenured female professor in Harvard's psychology department. And she's the creator and advocate of what she calls the psychology of possibility. Really cool stuff. So Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas, five of them in a brand new piece of chalk. Let's jump in. First, first big idea is reframing. Reframing. She shares research that I think that she did and her colleagues. Individuals going into a hospital to have major surgery, not necessarily a pleasant experience, but she challenged them, one group to reframe the experience, to see positive things in the their experience with the surgery and with their stay in the hospital. The other group, she didn't teach how to reframe. The group that reframed them thought of things like, well, this would be a chance for me to catch up on some goals, to take stock of what's important in my life, maybe to catch up with some friends and family I might have been taking for granted, or even forced weight loss. There were a number of ways that they could reframe the experience of being in the hospital for that event that was positive, that were positive right now. The other group didn't do those things. Fast forward what happened. The group that reframed their experience took less drugs, got out of the hospital faster, and had an overall better experience than those who didn't reframe it. It's a powerful idea. And of course, this isn't just about hospital stays in our lives. We have challenges. We can reframe them by asking better questions, by looking for the silver lining in the cloud. Right? The ways that we're learning. So think about it. In the note, we talk about it a little bit more. But if you're faced with a challenge in your life right now, pause and really look at how you can reframe the experience from the negative. That might be the habitual, knee jerk, reactive way to respond that everyone kind of conditions you to think about. That's mindless. If you, if we bring mindfulness to it, we can See that there's a seed of opportunity in any challenge, and these are truisms because they're true. So see if you can find the things you can learn from this experience, what opportunities might exist in this challenge, and reflect on it. Big idea. Reframing the second big idea. She challenges the idea that we need to delay gratification. We talked about this in the book we reviewed of tall Ben Shahars the other day to combine delayed gratification in the future. Put it over here right in instant gratification. She says, okay, that's nice, but what if we had ever present gratification? Ever present gratification? That's awesome. I'll take me some of that ever present gratification. She says, look, your Christmas presents that you're waiting to open, is that delayed gratification? Well, no, if you're enjoying the anticipation of opening them, that's current and future delayed gratification. What about your vacation that you're going to take in three weeks or in five weeks? You can experience joy in anticipation of that event. So we want to notice the opportunities for gratification now in every moment. In our talk on mindfulness, we looked at the fact that simply telling people they're doing the same activity, one group was told this is work. The other group was told this is play. And the play group doing the exact same thing had a much more positive experience than the work that the group that perceived what they were doing as work. So we want to do the same things. We have this idea that works fun. We go to work and then we play. But why we spend so much of our lives at work, make that fun. Make that a game. Find ways to have ever present gratification. And as I've shared before, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, there's a paradox of work. You're actually, even when you're at work, doing what you think is work, happier than when you're just lounging around. People need goals and projects, but we want to frame it in as positive a way as we can and get ever present gratification. That's our second big idea. The third big idea, presentations. She was talking about how she prepares for her lectures. Now she gives basically the same. She teaches the same class semester in and semester out. So rather than create one lecture that becomes fixed for her, she creates very rough notes. And then when she comes back to it the next semester or the year after that or the year after that, she needs to make it fresh. Now, I actually don't teach anything Twice. My stuff is always fresh. But what I've noticed is sometimes the perfectionist in me wants to map out every single thing I'm going to say, and if I'm not doing that, somehow I'm not preparing adequately. But the reality is when we do that, we fall into a mindless trap where when we're presenting, we. We're trying to remember what we were supposed to say and we lose the vitality of what we actually want to express and communicate and we don't discover new ways to say it. So it gave me even more permission to do what I do, which is I love just to make rough sketches and I drill a little bit deeper with a mind map to see how I want to present something, but to really own that and to allow us to be in the moment. So in the note, I talk about some of the best advice I've ever gotten on presentations, and I'll use this as a context to give it. Now, Steve Chandler, extraordinary coach, and I was coaching me and we had a conversation where he told me to focus on connection over perfection. Connection over perfection. That's a really cool idea. And if you're a perfectionist like me or just anyone who might get stressed, before you give a presentation, if you think you need to do it perfectly, you're going to be in your head. And even if you deliver it perfectly, the energy is not going to be there. So Steve made the point that, look, people don't care if you do something perfectly. They want to feel you, they want to feel your enthusiasm connect. Make that your priority. Connection over perfection. And he shared a story with me, John Madden, the football coach and broadcaster who gets so excited he's literally like spitting all over himself. And he apparently never watches himself, doesn't watch himself. Now, if he watched himself, he'd say to himself, God, I spit all over myself. That's not acceptable performance style. I got to fix those flaws, but no one cares. You watch John Madden, you feel his passion for football, and he's even better because he's just so big and so out of control. If he was trying to make it perfect, we wouldn't have him. So think about that. Connection over perfection loosely. Map out your ideas and let it rip. Find your own style. Do it mindfully, but those are some big ideas on presentations. Fourth, big idea, self definition. Langer tells us we want to be active in defining our sense of self. And she says, too often we're mindless about it and we go and we ask people's opinions or we look at Research and we look at the odds and then we do whatever we're told, you know, so, oh no, you're probably not going to get that. So you shouldn't go for it. So you don't go for it or you should go for that. So you know, you go and do it. You passively accept other people's advice. She says it's much better to be mindful about it. And advice can be great at times. But even if you fail in what you choose to do, let's say you go against what the experts say was the optimal approach and you turn out to be wrong, she says, that's actually still a win because you're actively self defining yourself. And it's much better to mindfully choose how you want to live your life than to mindlessly follow other people's advice and never figure out what's true for you. A really big idea. And I quote Vernon Howard, who has a great passage saying it's way better to fail again and again for 10 years under your own volition and finally figure it out than it is to mindlessly do what someone else tells you for your entire life. So keep that in mind. We want to actively define ourselves, which requires mindfulness and courage. And it also requires us to embrace confusion. She talks about the fact that mindful people are willing to create new categories. Mindless people basically just continue living their lives and never change anything in their minds. And they're not willing to challenge old constructions to create a new sense of meaning as new data comes in. But every moment is fresh. We know more about our lives today than we did yesterday or the week before, the month before, the year before, the decade before. So why would we live with the same attitude we had a decade ago? It doesn't make sense. But when we step into the unknown and we're willing to say, wow, what I thought was true may not be true. That's scary. By definition. You leave the comfort of stability of the known and it can get disorienting. And a lot of people want to go back into their comfort zones at that point anyway. She talks about that and the importance of being willing to go into that uncertainty. And it reminded me of a Tony Robbins event I went to years ago where when people would raise their hand, they'd often say, I'm confused. He'd be talking about certain things and he'd be challenging their ideas and they'd say, I'm confused. And he trained the audience of however many thousands of people whenever they heard someone say, I'm confused. Every single person in the auditorium stood up and gave this rousing standing ovation celebrating the fact that this person was confused. Because confusion is the gateway between what you thought you knew to be true and your new truth. You haven't quite figured it out yet, but you are willing to take a step forward into the unknown. So confusion is a beautiful thing. When we embrace it, we want to remember that. And remember that having courage in our lives isn't about never feeling stress or despair or fear. I quote Rollo May, who shares with us the fact that it's just learning how to deal with our despair. All sensitive people, and if you're watching this, you're a sensitive human being, has experienced despair. So it's not the absence of despair, it's learning how to work with it. And one of the things we want to do is to be able to tolerate ambiguity and confusion and growth more by moving into the uncertainty. That requires mindfulness. So there you go. We want to actively define ourselves. Choosing what's right for us even if we fail. That's more powerful than mindlessly following someone else's wisdom forever Presentations Connection over perfection. Big idea. An ever present gratification. Delayed and instant ever present gratification. We have the opportunity to make our lives full of that meaning more and more consistently and often. And then Reframing hospital patients. One group reframed their experience before they went in and saw the positivity in it. We want to change poison into medicine. Make the obstacle the way all the things we've been talking about in all these episodes. One key way to do that is reframing. So there you go. Quick look at this great book. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.